focal podcast

Austin Hughes is the co-founder and CEO of Unify GTM, a platform powering warm outbound for growth, marketing and sales teams. Previously, Austin was an early growth leader at Ramp, where he helped scale from a few hundred to over 12,000 customers in just two years. Unify GTM has raised over $30 million from investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital, and Emergence Capital, as well as founders from Ramp, Flexport, Box, and others.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:
01:30 - Why experimentation culture, not strategy, is the real growth secret at billion-dollar startups
03:32 - How running 100+ quarterly experiments creates massive competitive advantage—even with 70% failure rate
04:48 - Why your multi-week engineering sprints are killing growth—scope experiments to hours, not weeks
06:28 - Traditional growth channels beat moonshot virality—forget going viral, here's what actually works
09:00 - Why all your growth knowledge becomes useless when starting from zero revenue
12:28 - The exact customer threshold when traditional growth strategies finally start working
14:14 - Most companies kill experiments too early—why "this doesn't work" is your biggest growth obstacle
16:57 - What HubSpot's early growth tactics reveal about the counterintuitive power of partnerships
24:51 - The mathematical formula for prioritizing growth experiments nobody talks about
31:14 - Why most growth teams waste 90% of their time on the wrong activities
34:52 - How acting on website signals within 15 minutes can dramatically increase conversion rates
41:01 - Why growth hires—not engineers—will be the most crucial startup hires in coming years
42:28 - The costly mistake Austin would fix if restarting Unify: investing in growth 6 months earlier
45:16 - The surprising truth about what makes social media posts go viral for founders
48:19 - Why hiring growth talent from consulting and banking beats traditional marketing backgrounds
51:06 - The dangerous myth that you should perfect your product before selling it

Creators and Guests

Host
Pascal Unger
Co-founder / Managing Partner at focal.vc We lead pre-seeds in North America with up to $1M: We exclusively back AI native software startups at the very start. Thereafter, we help them get off the ground better and faster, supported by a network > 200 GTM executives. That's our singular, unwavering focus.

What is focal podcast?

Pivotal early lessons of today's best startups.

Welcome to the focal podcast where we go deep with some of today's best founders and operators on ONE crucial lessons from their early days.

This podcast is not the usual "highlight reel" startup podcast that goes one inch deep across 20+ topics. Rather, we ask the questions you’d ask if you were sitting across from them. No fluff, just the real, actionable insights you’d get if these founders were mentoring you 1on1.

We cover topics including:

- What worked and why.
- Costly mistakes and how they fixed them.
- Frameworks that truly made a difference.
- Tactics to move faster.
- What they wish they’d known sooner.
- And much more!

"Only a fool learns from their own mistakes. The wise learn from the mistakes of others."